Fischer, Berkeley, CA: The Mark Twain Project of the Bancroft Library, 1983, p. xv.)

That paragraph was written sometime in the middle to late 1870s, following the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and during the writing of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The plot sounds like vintage Twain: a story ripe with opportunities for humor, misunderstanding, high farce, and low cunning. But while The Prince and the Pauper certainly contains elements of those characteristics, Twain’s readers were to be surprised when the book was finally published. The Prince and the Pauper would, in many ways, be unlike any book Mark Twain had published to date.

Although heavily engaged in the writing of Huck Finn at the time, Twain was fascinated by the new plot of The Prince and the Pauper, and he dropped work on his magnum opus to toy with it. He even thought of writing the story as a play. Part of Twain’s obsession with The Prince and the Pauper may have stemmed from his dissatisfaction with his progress on Huck Finn. In fact, at some point, the one book must have overtaken the other—The Prince and the Pauper beat Huck Finn into publication by a full three years.

Intrigued though Twain may have been by his ingenious plot, there was another spur that forced him to get down to the writing of The Prince and the Pauper. While living in Hartford, Connecticut, he was invited to become a member of the Monday Evening Club, an informal society of about twenty of Hartford’s leading clergymen, writers, teachers, and businessmen. This small, august group met on alternate Mondays from fall to spring to listen to papers and essays of the members’ own devising and to consume a light supper and a fair amount of beer. (When one meeting was held in the house of a member who was teetotal, the Reverend Joseph Twitchell recorded that he found the evening “rather difficult to swallow.” Doubtless, Twain did as well.) Twain enjoyed these meetings, and he presented papers, including “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” (1876) and “What Is Happiness?” (1882), which many years later evolved into his philosophical dialogue “What Is Man?” (1906).

Much as Twain enjoyed the subjects under discussion, he was even more influenced by the members of the Monday Evening Club. And much as one would expect Twain to be disdainful of clergymen—as, in the main, he was of organized religion—the fact is he rather liked ministers and priests, as long as they were not of the “Mush and Milk” variety he made such memorable fun of in The Innocents Abroad (1869). One man of the cloth, and a member of the Monday Evening Club, was a close friend of Twain’s and was to have a profound effect on him—and lead directly to the creation of The Prince and the Pauper.

Edwin P. Parker (1836-1920), a Maine-born Congregationalist minister,a was a great admirer of Twain’s work, but he felt that there was more to his friend’s genius than the ability to be humorous and to satirize. He did not keep his opinions to himself:

Now let me say to what I have repeatedly said of you—I know of no American writer who is capable of writing such forcible, sinewy, racy English as you. You are abundantly capable of turning out some work that shall bear the stamp of your individuality and at the same time have a sober character and a solid worth and a permanent value. It may not pay in “shekels” but it would in vast honor and give your friends vast pleasure. Am I too bold? Pardon me, but I wish I had your opportunity and your Genius (letter, December 1880; Camfield, Gregg, ed. The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 378).

Parker had hit one of Twain’s tender spots, for Twain, too, had worried that he had a reputation as a humorist, but not as a serious writer. So it was at the urging of both Parker and another Monday Evening Club member, Hartford mayor Henry Robinson, that Twain decided to undertake more serious work on The Prince and the Pauper, even as he wrestled with the difficulties he was encountering in Huck Finn.

Writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn nettled Twain greatly; he wrote to William Dean Howells (1837-1920) that he found much to dislike in it, primarily the plot, and considered “pigeon-holing it” (that is, putting it aside) or even burning the manuscript! The writing of The Prince and the Pauper seems to have presented no such problems. He began the novel in the winter of 1877 and worked hard at it, telling his older brother Orion Clemens (1825-1897) that he labored on The Prince and the Pauper “with an interest that almost amounted to intemperance.” If that was the case, it was an intemperance that paid off handsomely. The book was finished by mid-1880, and Twain was enormously pleased with the result. He was sure that he had written something of lasting value, a book that was definitely a cut above his usual output. It was an opinion confirmed for him within his own family. He wrote to an old friend, “What am I writing? A historical tale of three hundred years ago. I swear the Young Girls Club [Twain’s wife and daughters] to secrecy and read the manuscript to them half a dozen chapters at a time.” (Camfield, p. 445) The girls and his wife were enthusiastic.

One of the most interesting, persistent, and specious myths of Twain lore is that his wife of some thirty-five years, Olivia Langdon Clemens, was a prude and a bluenose who restrained her husband’s more earthy tendencies, bowdlerizing his books and taking little or no pleasure in—in fact, being embarrassed by—his writing and his fame. This was not true, of course, even though the primary architect of his wife’s buttoned-up reputation was Twain himself.

Olivia Langdon was born into a wealthy family in upstate New York in 1845. She was a delicate and retiring woman who spent much of her early life, a period lasting from her early teens into her twenties, as an invalid. As the cosseted daughter of rich and doting parents, “Livy” must have seemed timid and retiring next to the far more ebullient Twain. Two people could not have had less in common, but Twain was determined that she would be his wife. Olivia’s parents were avid supporters of the temperance movement, and in order to win them to his cause Twain actually took the pledge, a move that horrified his old friends.